Hors D'oeuvres (Hannibal One-shots)

Metamorphoses

Summary: Alana contemplates just how much she's changed, and wonders if Margot would have liked any of her past selves.

Margot/Alana (Marlana, Murder Wives), season 3.

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Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

Everything changes, nothing perishes.

— Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, line 165

Alana studied the smooth, white ceiling of Margot's cavernous bedroom as her breathing evened out. Her post-coital high should have been enough to stop her from overthinking, at least for a moment, but she was not so lucky. Or maybe that was luck in and of itself — maybe, if she had let herself overthink a little more about Hannibal, it would have been enough to spook her away from a relationship with him in the same way that she had shied away from Will. While she had recovered in the hospital, she had dwelled obsessively over what could've been if she had been less blind, but it was too late for that. She had to move forward. She just didn't know if this was moving forward, or if she was trapping herself with the same personal failings. Maybe that was what spawned her question to Margot, studying the ceiling so that she didn't have to meet her lover's inquisitive eyes:

"Would you have liked me before, do you think?"

Margot turned over to face her. "You're going to have to be more specific."

Margot's tone held a touch of amusement, but beyond that, there was always something so soothing about her voice, slow and sultry even when talking about the most mundane of things, that Alana could feel herself relax.

"Before I was defenestrated." Just thinking about it drew her attention to the ache in her hips, and Alana settled deeper into the silk sheets, unsure whether what she was experiencing was phantom or real pain. Maybe it didn't matter which it was. "My life feels fundamentally fractured: before I hit the concrete and after. I look at who I was before, and I don't even recognize her. I was so sure of myself and my place in the world. I knew my purpose was to help people through their problems in the ways I wished I could help myself, and I thought I could do it. I thought I could save Will. I thought I could save Abigail. But in the end, I couldn't even save myself."

Alana turned to face Margot. The late afternoon sunlight filtering through the westward-facing window illuminated her like an avenging angel, smoothing out the premature creases from a lifetime of worry and igniting her eyes like emeralds set in painted porcelain.

"Sounds noble, if not worryingly naïve and disconnected from reality."

"Glowing praise," Alana said dryly, and Margot's lips quirked up in a smile. Alana responded in kind, but the smile fell from her face as quickly as it appeared.

"I don't know," Margot said after a beat, bringing them back to Alana's question. "Tell me more about who you were."

So she did. She told Margot about how she grew up with three brothers, two older and one younger, and an older sister. She told her about desiring more parental attention than her parents could give five children, and how her younger brother had been so resentful of this lack of parental attention that he went off the rails and was still lost in the weeds. She told her about how she had struggled with overthinking and overanalyzing from a very young age, and how being stuck in her own head led her to want to help other people escape theirs. She told her about how she felt responsible for the people around her, somehow, as if they could live better lives if she just worked a little harder to help them. She told her about her savior complex and perfectionism. She told her about her confident, borderline-arrogant belief in the sharp lines between good and evil. And through it all, she felt no judgement from Margot.